‘What is it, Private?’
‘My friend,’ he blubbered. Behind him lay a boy in the grass, also sixteen or seventeen. His eyes were still open. The back of his skull and left ear were blown off. The flies had started to come for the meat.
‘What are you doing here alone?’ I asked the boy. I knew the cruelty of my question: until the shelling twenty minutes ago he was not alone. Now he was trying not to leave his friend. He was trying not to be left.
‘I… I…’
‘Get back to camp.’
The boy got up and started to move down the unsealed road, between two rows of thin poplars.
‘Private!’
‘Sir?’ He turned around.
‘You forgot to take his boots.’
He gave me a look of hatred so pure I knew he could keep fighting.
Such brutality we had taken inside of us.
In the sanatorium we sit at a long table, the monks in brown robes at the head of it, soldiers down the end. We patients wear remnants of uniforms–the greatcoats are especially prized–or a mishmash of civilian clothes if relatives have managed to send some. The only sound is the leather of the novitiates’ sandals slapping the stone as they bring in the meal. All is calm, apart from the Christ hanging at the end of the room, naked and dying. He looks familiar–like a relative? So far as I can tell, he and I are the only Jews here. A row of high windows lets in light that striates the room, illuminating the air in all its minute, flying particles.
I have not spoken for seven and a half weeks. In the military hospital at Verdun they put electrodes on my tongue to spark it, as though the failure were mechanical. When I cried out they determined there was nothing wrong with my body, so they sent me here, where time, shunted only by slow bells, stretches out to heal.
The silence was a relief.
Lipp nods as he sits down next to me, tucking a napkin into his collar and spreading it out wide over his chest. He is a medical doctor in fancy clothes, but also a socialist–he insists on living in a stone cell just like everyone else here. Lipp is chatty, assiduous in his care of us. Nothing shocks him. During the day, I watch him move among the men as though doing the rounds of a normal hospital, speaking quietly, pulling on his goatee. He addresses me without waiting for an answer, as if to be mute were an entirely appropriate reaction to this world.
In the summer of 1914 everyone had wanted war, me included. We were told there had been French attacks already, that the Russians were massing on our border. The Kaiser called on us all to defend the nation, whatever our politics or religion. He said, ‘I know no parties, only Germans…’ And then he said, ‘My dear Jews…’ My dear Jews! We were bowled over by our personal invitation to war. War seemed holy and heroic, just as they had taught us at school–something to give our lives meaning and make us pure.
What could we have done, ever, to need such purification as that?
Dr Lipp bows his head and closes his eyes, then crosses himself and addresses his attention to his bowl, where barley and pieces of carrot float in a pale broth. Unusually for a socialist, he is also a fervent Catholic. He is convinced all things are part of a plan, even if we mortals cannot know it.
Some of the veterans have horrendous wounds, mended as best as possible at field hospitals before the men came here to be tended for other, unseen damage. Four are missing legs, or parts of them. Each is entitled to two prosthetic legs from the War Ministry in Berlin, but they have not come. The fellow opposite us has lost both arms, one from the shoulder, the other from the elbow. His prostheses have arrived. They are made of metal and attach around his chest on the side where there is no arm, and to the remnants of the other arm by leather straps with metal buckles, the same as on a school satchel. He must need help to put them on in the mornings. As he sat down, I noticed his fly buttons were left open–is this an oversight, or a necessity? In a world without arms, dignity is hard to maintain. Can he handle his prick with the hook?
His neighbour reaches across for the man’s spoon and without asking starts to feed him. Before, when I passed returned men on the streets of Munich or Berlin, the legless wheeling themselves along on boards, their cloth-bound hands pushing the ground, or sitting on their stumps on grey army-issue blankets selling matches, or the hundreds and hundreds of ‘storkmen’ on crutches, I thought them adept. I permitted myself the fantasy that, because of the cripple’s skill with the board or crutch or cane, he had come to terms with his situation. Here, we fall off crutches and out of chairs, soiling ourselves and weeping with rage. This, too, is a transition stage that should be hidden. And it is being hidden, here.
It’s a good broth today–chicken. The monks raise their own, and are not required to send them in for the war effort, just the bones afterwards for stock-meal, like everyone else. Theo on my left used to be an apprentice waiter at Aschinger’s restaurant in Berlin. His nose and top jaw have been knocked out by a grenade; he wears a dark cloth patch that covers the centre of his face. Beneath it is a reddish hole his breath goes in and out of. The patch has no practical value; he wears it to spare others the sight of him. His eyes are pale blue above it, and hard to look at too.
Theo starts to feed himself, putting the spoon to the back of his throat and swallowing as best he can. The noise is disgusting. He will never kiss a girl. He will never work. He cannot speak. Outside, the dead are honoured as heroes, but in here the maimed are ashamed.
Lipp turns to him and nods his approval. ‘Good man,’ he says, ‘that’s the way.’
The next course is matjes and potatoes. Theo mashes the oily fish into pieces of potato and does his best.
At the end of lunch, they ring another bell. We set down our spoons, traces of apricot syrup a bright filigree in the bowls. Talk resumes on the way out. Men light cigarettes. I walk behind Lipp, who is telling Theo of a metal prosthetic jaw, ‘ingeniously screwed into the remaining bone’. They have taken Theo’s sheets away.
When Lipp moves on to another inmate, Theo falls in with me. He raises his eyebrows and the little cloth puffs out a snort. He’s brave, but he has the look, like many of us here: This cannot possibly be my life; there must be some mistake.
I think Theo likes our mutual silence. He knows as well as I do that the government doctors are not coming to give him a mechanical jaw–or if so, only in passing. They are coming to assess whether he, Theo Poepke, can return to civilian life, or whether he will be sent for the foreseeable future to one of the secret military hospitals. This is not a health issue. It is one of morale: the authorities do not want the horrifically wounded to sabotage support for the war, to frighten women on trams.
Just as Theo has settled into my cell to read, Dr Lipp runs in brandishing the newspaper.
‘The tide is turning!’ he shouts, then louder: ‘The end is near!’
Theo raises his eyebrows at me good-naturedly. We are mute, not deaf.
White bubbles of spittle have collected in the corners of Lipp’s mouth and the pale pink lining of his trouser pocket hangs loose from his hip.
‘The Social Democrats have split! A group of them are voting to end the war! Block the funding! They’re founding a new anti-war party, the…’ He squints his left eye for better grip on his monocle. ‘“Independent Social Democratic Party”. This is it, boys—’ He slaps the paper loudly with the back of his hand.
‘Show me that,’ I say.
‘—and they’re not locking them up this time!’ Lipp finishes. Then stops, a wet grin splitting his face. ‘He speaks,’ he says.
Theo looks at me, his eyes going up at the corners. It could be a smile.
Once I started talking, they soon let me out. At first I was aimless. It was 1917, and although the end of the war might have been nearer than the beginning, it was still too far off. I went to Munich and enrolled at the university; I had a love affair with a girl whose sweetheart was at the front. When he was killed she lost interest in me.
My friends kept dying, throughout that year and the next. I had been saved
but I did not feel worthy of it. Then I joined the new party–the Independents–and we campaigned for peace. My strength started to return. The authorities called us traitors, saboteurs of the war effort. They broke up our meetings and took us into custody. But we were as prepared to die for our country as they were; some of us already had. We just wanted to save it first.
In the monastery I thought the atoms had realigned to form me again, moved into place by notes of song and invisible grace. But now I see that the solid thing was outside of me; I had hitched my hopes to history.
The revolution came in Russia, and we waited for our own.
Clara moves her shoulders, her neck from side to side. It is as if we have both been back in the monastery with the wounded and the monks.
‘Are you all right?’ she asks.
‘I haven’t thought of those people for a long time.’ My voice is hoarse.
There’s a line between her brows and her eyes are searching. It is a face ravaged with puzzlement, sympathy brimming close to the surface. She blinks it away. ‘How about I go get us some sandwiches?’
‘Thank you.’
She puts her hands into the small of her back and arches, catlike, then pushes out her chair. She moves to the door for her jacket, but turns to face me before she gets there.
‘After lunch, I thought, we could work in the park for a bit.’ She opens her arms, gesturing at the abandoned world. ‘I mean, for some air. See what’s left of the cherry bl—’
I shake my head. I will stay in this room. I have always worked best in captivity.
She slips on her jacket.
‘Why don’t you have yours in the park?’
She is uncertain, then relieved. ‘Okay…’ She shoulders her bag.
‘Actually, take the afternoon off. We’ve done enough for one day.’
She looks at me sceptically. It is inconceivable to her that someone would voluntarily stay in a room day and night when right outside this grand city shimmers and beckons like an amusement park, a lucky dip for grown-ups. Also, she suspects I’ll not eat.
‘I’ll bring you a sandwich first.’
‘No need.’
‘The usual?’ Clara has a way of ignoring me that is tender, not brusque. She is a ringmaster in a room with a tired old lion. She needs no chair or whip, the tone of voice will do.
‘Thank you.’
‘Capers?’
‘Please.’ I smile up at her. ‘And thank you, Clara.’
RUTH
I take the milk out of the fridge and sniff it. It’s okay. I boil the kettle and take care to pour the water into the cup, not the tin of International Roast. Last week, in a minuscule moment of steaming absent-mindedness, I ended up with an overflowing coffee tin. I wedge a packet of Scotch Finger biscuits under my armpit and take the cup down the hall to the front room. Most old people, I am convinced, live on Scotch Finger biscuits.
When I sit back down in front of Toller I spray crumbs everywhere–it’s the Big Bang of biscuits! There are more crumbs than there ever was biscuit, and the thing will remain forever inexplicable. Bev is coming later on to clean. Of course she is cross when the place is not already clean. Long ago I decided to treat her huffing and puffing, her toxic, airborne reproaches as a game, as something that bonded us. She can sneer at my slovenliness (but I gave up the cigarillos!) while I feign gratitude for her ministrations. By this ritual we silently acknowledge that her virtue is superior to mine, though I, by happenstance and in no way that speaks to my merit, am superior in money.
So Toller had been in a sanatorium. I find it hard to think of such a firebrand mute. Dora never mentioned it–maybe she didn’t know much about it. Though she did tell me other things about his war, things he would not speak about publicly. He’d volunteered, she said, because he’d wanted to ‘prove with his life’ his love of Germany. His physical courage had frightened those around him. Once, when a soldier lay wounded in no man’s land, Toller ran out to pull him in but was forced back into the trench by a hail of artillery fire. For three days and nights the boy called them by name, at first loud and desperate, and then weaker and sadder. By the time he died Toller’s enthusiasm for the war had curdled into a suicidal recklessness in the protection of his men. Dora said he felt responsible for the mess they were in, as if it were, somehow, all his fault.
Dearest Toller. Why is it famous people are so much shorter in real life? The first time Dora brought him to my studio in Berlin–I was at Nollendorf Platz, so that makes it 1926 or ’7–I opened the door and looked down and saw only two huge-horned gramophones, a pair of legs under each. Dora’s voice came from behind one.
‘He bought six of them, would you believe. For friends. One for you.’
‘But we’ve never met!’ I was embarrassed as soon as the words left my mouth, as if I’d said them in front of royalty. But I was shocked at the extravagance.
‘Don’t be so literal, Ruthie,’ Dora’s voice said. ‘You going to let us in?’
They put them down on a table. Toller turned to me, smiling. For an instant I was in the presence of a piece of fiction, someone come to life from the pages of the Munich Revolution, from a WANTED poster, from theatre playbills. And then he was just there: a youngish man in a rumpled silk shirt, with wild, grey-streaked hair streaming off his forehead, pumping my hand. He held my eyes with his.
Toller had no small talk, no register for Bekannten–acquaintances. He would fix you with those dark eyes, for slightly too long. His only mode, with everyone, was intimacy. Women loved him for it. He bypassed all the agonising repartee, the uncertain negotiations of flirtation, and spoke as if he knew them, had already been inside them. Who wouldn’t give themselves, wholly and fully, to a man who might at any minute sacrifice himself to save the world?
He was still smiling, holding my hand. ‘I’d be able to look you in the eye,’ he let go and gestured loosely to his bandy legs, ‘if these damn things were straight.’
I laughed.
‘Dora’s told me all about you.’
‘Really?’ It seemed unlikely to me. Dora was over at my light-table, looking at some negatives. I could tell by her stillness, though, that she was listening. Just as everything he said to me was intended for her.
Dora turned around, suppressing a smile. ‘He’s exaggerating,’ she said, her eyes on him. ‘I barely said a thing.’
‘She told you I needed a gramophone?’ I looked from one to the other. They laughed. ‘It’s very kind but I can’t—’
‘Please,’ the great man said, showing me both palms, ‘I couldn’t resist. I really would like you to have it.’ He started to cough, raising a fist to his mouth.
I saw then that to make a fuss would be to imply there was something abnormal about buying six gramophones on a whim, at least one of them for someone you’d never met.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
He looked relieved. The coughing stopped. ‘Sorry.’ He lowered the fist to his chest. ‘An old lung problem.’
Dora let out a chuckle. ‘That was your generation’s malaise du jour, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘The problem on the lung.’ She was a straight talker, though utterly without malice. People rarely took offence, but I saw Toller start. My cousin had been working for him for all of two weeks.
‘And yours would be?’
‘Oh, well…’ She was thinking quickly. ‘Ours would be–a complex of some kind. Father complex, mother complex, insecurity complex, authority complex…’
‘Got all those too,’ Toller smiled. ‘They just don’t make me cough. And anyway, I’m not even ten years older than you.’
Dora nodded as if to say touché, and turned back to my light-table. There was a tension between them I could almost see, like a string across the room, taut and loose and taut again. I realised they were lovers.
I pointed Toller to a stool. ‘Shall we get started?’
Dora had arranged for me to take his photograph for a poster promoting Wotan Unchained, his new pla
y. She’d told me how biting it was–a comedy about a megalomaniac barber called Wotan who wants, through a deft combination of demagoguery and butchery, to save post-war Germany from communists and Jews. (To think of that now! Terrible for Toller, really, to be able to see so clearly what was coming.)
I touched his shoulders lightly, to square him to me. The cyclorama behind him was white as his shirt; it would be beautiful to have that great dark head coming out of brightness.
‘Just be yourself,’ I said, moving back to my camera.
‘Easy for you to say.’ He eyed the camera on its tripod. ‘You get to hide behind that thing.’
I stopped winding the film on. He was smiling at me in such a way that I felt suddenly, and absolutely, seen.
I turned back to my work.
‘“Act natural”,’ he continued, ‘is the worst thing you can say to an actor. They simply forget how to be. They get a kind of slow swagger.’ He readjusted himself on the stool. When I looked up again he was posing, fist to chin and frowning, like Rodin’s Thinker.
‘Stop impersonating yourself,’ Dora called from the other side of the room.
‘Told you it’s too hard,’ he said softly to me, and then he started fooling about, forming pose after pose, thinker to boxer to a gorilla scratching his sides, like an actor warming up, or someone looking for his character. This wasn’t working at all.
‘Dee, can you give me a hand here?’ I called.
She came over. I gave her a light meter to hold, behind me. It was a useless task: I needed her in his line of vision, to steady him.
The photograph became famous. It was used on all the playbills for his productions from then on, and sometimes by the newspapers too. It’s a close-up, dominated by the eyes. They are large and kind and, somehow, naked. His mouth, full and curved, is closed. His brow is a little furrowed; there’s a matching cleft in his chin. He looks as if he’s just asked you, a beloved, to join him in one of his causes–feeding the starving Russians or repealing the censorship laws or freeing political prisoners. He is the poster boy for the new, post-war world, and though he knows the price you might pay, he wants you. He sits in a halo of light fragile as glass, as a bubble.